


Apples in the Fall

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical themes, Episode: s09e10 Road Trip, M/M, Post-Gadreel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25943110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Crowley's little trick with the needles has some repercussions.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 20
Kudos: 102





	Apples in the Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Let's assume Cas never got his grace back. Let's assume he never healed Sam. Let's assume life still moves on, unimpeded, the way it's wont to do.
> 
> Shout out to thebeespatella for talking this through with me. <3

When Sam is a baby, it’s Dean’s job to take care of him. It used to be Mom’s job, and for a little while it was Dad’s—but Dad is tired. He’s tired and sad, distracted by something that Dean will only understand in later years is single-minded intensity. He forgets things—little things—all the time. He forgets to feed Sam, to change him. He sleeps through the night when Sam cries (something that, later, Dean will understand as  _ being buried in the bottle). _

Dean does these things because someone has to. Because Sam is crying, because Sam is wet, is hungry, is scared. They don’t have a mom anymore—Dean’s still fuzzy on the details of that, but he knows enough to know that she’s not coming back. He knows the slack-jawed, white-mouthed terror of it. He knows he gets stomach aches at night, feels her loss like pain, the lack of her arms around him.

Dean learns to make up bottles for Sammy, dragging a chair to the kitchen sink so he can reach. He changes his diapers. When Sam is hollering at night and won’t stop, not for anything, Dean is beside himself. He’s scared. He cries too.

“Sammy, what is it?” Dean peers into his little face, bright red and screwed up tight. He screams and he screams, and Dean is scared to death that Sam can’t breathe. “It’s okay. Sam, don’t cry.”

Dean reaches into the crib and pets down the side of Sam’s red, wet face. Sam grabs his fingers in a little hand and latches on tight. Dean’s eyes are brimming over with tears.

“It’s okay.”

He lifts Sam out of the crib with little bird arms, careful to support the back of his head. He hugs Sam close, rocking him until his great, screaming cries peter off into tight, tiny little whimpers. Dean sinks down to the floor, Sam still bundled in his arms, squirming to get comfortable now. Sam looks at him with accusing eyes.

“I know,” Dean says. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, but it feels good. It feels right.

“I’m sorry, Sammy.”

Sam gurgles and turns fitfully. He reaches a chubby arm up to pat Dean on the mouth. Dean cuddles him close, and they fall asleep like that, salt-soaked and wrapped up in each other. It’s a memory that’ll be forgotten.

That was Dean’s life, see. It was what he knew, what he’s always known, and he was so damn good at it. Sam was easy to take care of as a baby, once Dean got the hang of it. He wanted simple things: to be warm, to be fed, to be dry and hugged and safe. He wanted things that Dean could give him.

Sammy as a little kid wasn’t much different. He wanted stories read to him. He wanted to play with the blue truck, no the  _ blue _ one,  _ Dean— _ dissolving into fits of giggles when Dean held up the wrong one on purpose, again and again like he didn’t know what blue was, just to make Sammy smile. Sam wanted to play Batman and Superman. He wanted to play cops and robbers. He wanted Dean to hug him close and push the hair out of his eyes and say, aw Sammy, see, you’re alright when he fell down.

But Sam grew and grew, and the things he wanted became incomprehensible. Some years he was like an alien to Dean, a long, lanky alien in the place where his brother used to be. It was disturbing in every sense of the word. It bothered Dean more than he ever let on. Sam started to want things like school dances and Thanksgiving. He wanted his own space, pulling away from Dean, away and away and away in a way that made Dean’s stomach clench even then. He felt untethered when Sam wasn’t by his side—if not Sam, then what?

He had hunting. Hunting and Dad and the car Dad had given him for his 21st birthday—his Baby, sweeter than anything else—but none of them filled the strange, Sam-shaped hole he could feel at the very center of him—the one that had been branded into him at the very start of his being, so how was he ever supposed to be any other way? There was Sam. In a distant second, there was the job. Everything else was just set dressing.

But Sam wanted to be normal, and Dean didn’t understand. He didn’t understand the fights Sam got into with Dad.  _ Chill out, man. You’re only making it worse. Stop mouthing off like that all the time, and he won’t be so hard on you. _ Sam just huffed, blew out a shitty little teenage breath through his nose like Dean didn’t get it either. Like  _ Dean _ was the problem, and fuck if that didn’t make something in his gut burn raw.

Dean didn’t understand him in those years, went crazy with wanting to, buried it in cars and booze and girls—and then Sam left. (He  _ left.  _ He fucking left) and then it didn’t much matter what Dean did or didn’t get.

He got his second chance, though. Bought and paid for with Dad’s disappearance, Dad’s hunt for Azazel shittier and shittier, more incomprehensible in the rearview the older Dean gets. Bought and paid for with so damn much blood. Jo’s and Ellen’s. Bobby’s. His and Sam’s and his and Sam’s, over and over like the world’s worst goddamn merry-go-round. Kevin’s. Cas’s. Fucking hell.

And then he did the worst thing, the actual, honest to God worst thing, and he broke Sam. And the bitch of it is, he’d do it all over again, even knowing what he knows. He’d do it over again in a heartbeat. Sam would call him a selfish bastard over it, and he’d be right. He’s a fucking monster, after all.

Only Sam’s not saying much of anything these days.

* * *

Sam’s lunch sits untouched in front of him, Campbell’s soup growing cold and congealing.

“Sam,” Dean tries. “Hey, Sammy.”

Sam is unresponsive. He looks out the window, eyes fixed on something at the horizon.

Sam spends a lot of time looking out the window. At first, Dean had worried. He worried that Sam was seeing something Dean couldn’t see—a reaper, maybe Death himself come to pluck Sam from Dean’s hands once again. Then he worried that Sam was seeing things that weren’t there. Lucifer again, whatever dark things had preyed upon his mind when he’d come back from the Cage—but Sam doesn’t seem to be looking at much of anything.

His eyes track movement well enough. They follow the birds that land on the windowsill from time to time, the grey squirrels that skitter up the oak trees in the yard—the clouds drifting faintly across the sky, if there’s nothing else to see. Sometimes Sam’s brow furrows in deep concentration, his lips pursing like there’s something on the tip of his tongue.

Dean had tried to coax it out of him, at first. He’s long since given up. Whatever Sammy thinks, it’s between him and the absent motherfucker upstairs, because Sam’s not telling.

He sighs and picks up Sam’s spoon. He scoots his chair closer, pushing his stomach all the way into the table so he can get close enough, and brings the spoon to Sam’s mouth.

“C’mon, Sammy, open up.”

Sometimes it works. Today it doesn’t. Sam isn’t in the mood to oblige. The spoon bumps against Sam’s lips, smearing salt and grease there. Dean sighs.

“Come on, man, you’ve gotta eat.”

But Sam doesn’t want to. Sometimes he does, so it’s not a forcing kind of issue. He’s glad about that, at least. He doesn’t have the stomach to force much of anything on Sam these days.

Dean pulls the bowl in front of himself and eats the soup cold. Sam watches the birds out the window.

* * *

Sam had always been smart—so goddamn smart. Dean remembers him bringing home these report cards—all A’s—beaming and proud fit to burst until enough report cards were met with barely more than a grunt and a nod. With  _ go help your brother bring the willow stakes inside. _ Then he’d find the report cards crammed into Sam’s backpack, crumpled in the pockets of his jeans, if he ever found them at all. These little paper proofs of Sam’s intelligence, that he was the smart one in their family, the one that could go anywhere, do anything, really make something of himself.

Sam is—well, Sam is different now. It’s as far as Dean will let himself get with that line of thought. Sam is different. Dean doesn’t let himself think the word ruined. He doesn’t let himself think the words damaged or disabled either.

He does think  _ my fault. _ He thinks it almost constantly.

* * *

It’s raining today. It rains a lot in the little Washington town where they’ve settled. Hunting stopped making sense months back, and with it, the bunker. Dean had locked the door on those great treasure troves of lore and weapons, a hunter’s paradise. He’d locked the door on all of it and barely given it a backward glance, bundling his dreamy-eyed brother into the car. He packed light, leaving most everything behind. There are touches of them inside the bunker’s walls, signs of a life barely started, aborted mid-stroke. They might stay there for all of time, and the thought sends a little shiver through Dean. He wonders, sometimes, if Charlie will return to empty halls.

Well, Charlie is a smart cookie. She’ll be fine either way.

Dean took the weapons— _ their _ weapons—his 1911, Sammy’s Taurus. The latter is more aspirational, a dream from a bygone era, but he took it all the same. He bought salt from a restaurant supply store in town, a great 25 pound sack of it that he dips into for cooking and warding alike. He still has the knife and with it, jars of holy oil lined up in the pantry, mixed in among the Bisquick, canola oil, and rice that attracts weevils no matter what he does.

The rain touches down in fat, heavy droplets that bead along the surface of the glass. Sam presses his hand against it, and Dean wonders, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, what goes on in that head. Sam used to talk so  _ much, _ all the time, whether Dean wanted it or not.

There are scars on Sam’s face now, divots at his temples, in the center of his forehead, evidence of the way Dean has failed.

Sam holds his hand against the window, fingertips splayed, face pressed close. His breath fogs the glass.

Dean comes up behind him, footsteps deliberately loud after a lifetime of stealth, telegraphing his presence loud and clear. He hovers his hand above Sam’s shoulders for the space of a few breaths, uncertain, before letting it fall.

“Wanna watch a movie, Sammy?” He keeps his voice deliberately light, and it still sounds too loud in the hushed house. They’re far from the road, and the rain dampens whatever is left of the sound outside.

Dean doesn’t get an answer right away, and he doesn’t expect one. Sam stays glued to the window, looking at something beyond in the twilight grey of stormy weather. Dean stays perfectly still and waits. He’s learning to be patient. Little by little, he’s learning. He stands close to his brother and together, they watch. Dean watches for danger. Sam—who knows? 

Their faces make reflections on the perfectly polished glass, marred only by the smudges of Sam’s fingerprints. Dean tries not to think about how much it looks like they’re both crying as the rain touches down.

Sam nods, eventually. He lumbers up from his chair by the window (his chair, no one else’s—Dean will never sit in it) and goes to sit on the couch. He looks at Dean expectantly.

“Popcorn?” Dean asks.

Sam just looks at him, doesn’t give him a yes or no. Dean sinks into the vacant space beside him, not particularly invested in popcorn and feeling raw at the edges. He needs to touch, needs to feel that the corners of his world are still in place, however cracked and fragmented they may be. It’s a selfish need, but when has he ever been anything but?

Sam flows over him like water, ebbing away the empty spaces between them. He presses tight to Dean’s side, so close that Dean can feel the fine tremors that run beneath the thin cotton of his t-shirt.

Dean splays a hand across his back, rubbing in slow, easy circles. He gets his arm around the crook of Sammy’s neck, pulling him in so he can rest his mouth against the silk puff of Sam’s hair. He smells like scalp and shampoo, like a few days’ worth of oil, like the musty smell Dean can never quite air out of the cloistered bedroom where they sleep.

Dean opens his mouth and breathes him in, sucking in hot breaths until Sam bats him away, annoyed.

Dean’s fingers twitch in his absence, bereft and lonely. Sam watches the movie, the bright flash and color of some cartoon, whatever was on—Dean rigged the cable, so they catch it all. Sam watches TV, and Dean watches him, Sam’s lips moving along, clumsy and out of step with the dialogue. Dean would kill to hear him say anything—anything at all.

It feels like a small eternity before Sam takes pity on him, eyeing Dean and sidling closer so Dean can hook him in close again, holding him safe, arm over arm. Dean lets out an enormous sigh of relief, whole again with the feeling of Sam vivid and live beneath him. The edge of his finger brushes against Sam’s bare skin, the place where his collar gives way to a tanned, hollow expanse of collarbone.

Sam pats Dean’s arm in comfort.

Sam watches the movie, and Dean watches him, and the ghosts of people long passed laugh as a soundtrack.

* * *

They share a bed, have done since nearly the beginning, from the first night they rolled up to this quiet cabin and made it their own. There are two bedrooms, two full beds. Dean gave Sam his pick, which means Sam didn’t—pick. Sam still has his preferences, will make it clear as fucking day if Dean ever does something he doesn’t like. He’s still a big dude. He can still lay Dean out with his fists, still bloody his nose. A temper tantrum is ugly and violent when it comes with a six foot frame. Sam just picks fewer things to have preferences about these days.

That first day—tired after days behind the wheel with no one to relieve him, tired after sitting next to Sam’s silent form, watching the shadows in his eyes, the drool leaking from the corner of his mouth like a silent accusation—they’d landed on the front porch. Dean had shuffled for the key, awkwardly balancing their bags on his hip. He’d opened the door on a silent, stale living room, dust motes dancing in the air. He’d tossed all their earthly possessions in an unassuming heap and let Sam inside.

There was a breath he’d been holding since they crossed the Kansas state line. He didn’t let it out quite yet—couldn’t—but maybe a little of it pressed past his lips then, bleeding out the tension in slow, small sips.

Sam had lingered on the threshold, eyebrows knotted in consternation, and Dean had waited one, two, three beats before ushering him inside, a hand barely ghosting along the small of Sam’s back because who the fuck was he to touch anymore.

“Home sweet home, Sammy. What’dya think?”

It had been optimistic, probably. Voice chipper and light like he could rebuild everything they’d lost—everything he’d stolen—brick by fucking insubstantial brick.

Sam just looked at him,  _ who do you think you’re kidding, slim? _

For a second it was so much the old Sam. That bitchy, sharp mouth, those heaven-rolled eyes with a badly stifled smirk at the corner because no matter how mad Sam got, he was always at least a little amused with Dean—they were so close in that instant. So close Dean could taste it.

But the moment evaporated and the wordless, garbled sound of distress that slipped out of Sam’s mouth was something all new—horrifying in its newness.  _ Home sweet hell,  _ Dean amended in his head, and there was no one around to hear it.

*

Later, Sam stood in the hallway, Dean at his side. There was a window at its fore that made Dean fucking uneasy—what the hell’s a house doing with so many windows, anyway? So goddamn hard to guard—it let sunlight through, sunlight bright and yellow through the hard water-stained glass, flickering over mineral deposits. Sam stood limned in that light, crowned with a golden halo, chest breathing hard, caught between door one and door two.

“’S alright, Sammy. It’s not a game show. Whichever one you want.”

But Sam had stood there frozen, eyes wide and breath quick.

“Why don’t you take that one?” Dean said quietly. For a minute, it was almost like old times. He was eight and teaching Sam how to tie his shoes. He was twelve and helping Sam pick out a present for Dad. He’s thirty-five and steering Sam into one of the clean, empty bedrooms in this house. “Nice big window, yeah? You can see out on the lawn.”

Sam stayed where Dean put him, but he didn’t fight when Dean hauled Sam’s duffel into the room, when he put Sam’s things away in the cedar-scented drawers. Sam watched him from the doorway, and Dean had never felt quite so much like dying.

He hauled up a smile for Sam, one that lived somewhere in the depths, conjured from wild hunts and near-misses, from quick getaways and feral laughter.

“Just give it time, yeah?” he said, unsure which one of them he was saying it to.

*

Sam sleeping in his own bed hadn’t lasted long. Dean put him to bed that first night—put him to bed like he hadn’t done since Sam was a kid, worried about monsters with a spun sugar innocence. Sam wouldn’t go to bed on his own, was the thing. Whatever damage Crowley had dealt had  _ done  _ something to Sam.

Dean finds him nodding off sometimes, in the chair by the window, on the sofa. Once, alarmingly, in the back garden, and Dean had hollered himself hoarse looking for Sam, sick terrified that something had happened—that something had taken him, that Sam had wandered off, and Dean had  _ failed _ again.

He found Sam nestled among the weeds, crooked between two of the fat pumpkins Dean has been trying to grow, sleepy and fuzzy and clenching around Dean’s heart like a vice grip when he’d turned that unfocused gaze on him and smiled.

So Dean puts him to bed, uncertain navigating these new facets of their relationship, rough-hewn from the well-oiled ashes of their brotherhood. He gets Sam into his pajamas, turns down the covers and tucks him in tight—too tight, because Sam fidgets his way free, huffing and twisting.

“Alright, alright, sorry. Forgot you hated that.” A ghost of a smile finds its way onto Dean’s face, an echo of other times. His fingers still have the knack of this, of tucking Sam into bed, doing up pajama bottoms and brushing dry kisses over a forehead.

It’s an older sense memory, embedded in his muscles like the slow, easy squeeze of a trigger—farther back and less called-upon but no weaker for it. It’s baked into his DNA, seared onto the quiet planes of his heart way down low.

“Goodnight,” he says and turns off the light.

Sam’s eyes watch him in the dark.

Dean checks the house one more time, devil’s traps on the ceiling and salt lines across every window and door, angel warding scrawled on the walls for good measure. He doesn’t figure anyone has a particular bone to pick with the two of them—not right now, in any case. Heaven and hell will wage their wars, and it’s got nothing to do with them, but there are always old grudges. The past never goes away, and there’s always someone eager to come collect. The house is as secure as it’s going to get.

When there’s not a damn thing he can do to make them any safer, Dean turns in to the room across the hall from Sam’s, in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house. He doesn’t bother to take off his clothes, bone-weary in a way he doesn’t expect to sleep off, not if he slept for a hundred years, but a single night’s a start. He collapses face-down on the stiff old mattress, face pressed to blankets that still smell too much like mothballs.

Sleep won’t come for him.

He rolls over onto his back and stares at the rafters tinted darkest grey by the lack of moon. He presses his hand to his face and fucking cries.

*

He wakes to a weight settling on his bed, hand gripping the handle of the gun beneath his pillow, safety off and pressed to the temple of an intruder before he’s fully awake. He recognizes Sam by smell alone. It’s still too dark to see more than the barest shapes of him—Sam swatting the gun away, unconcerned. Like it hasn’t occurred to him for a second that Dean might shoot him.

_ Do you trust me? _ Dean thinks wildly.  _ Do you even understand? _

“Sammy? What’s wrong?” he asks.

Sam doesn’t answer. Sam never answers. He climbs into bed, not even bothering to pull aside the covers, just landing on Dean in the most uncomfortable way possible, pinning him beneath the blankets. Still Dean’s pain in the ass little brother despite everything, still the pain in the ass he loves best.

Sam settles in, turning away from him in the dark. A few long minutes go by, and Sam doesn’t budge. That’s how Dean figures he means to stay.

Dean props himself up on an elbow, runs a hand through his hair. “Hey,” he huffs. “Hang on, let me—”

He wrestles the covers out from under Sam, which takes some doing. With a lot of huffing and tugging and absolutely no help at all, he eventually gets them both nestled under an unfamiliar quilt. Sam sighs when Dean finally gets them both settled, a long, satisfied exhalation.

Sam drops off long before he does, light snores marking his passage into dream land.

“Glad one of us can sleep, buddy,” Dean says to Sam’s back.

He doesn’t touch—doesn’t think he has it in him to do that—but the broad, solid expanse of his brother’s back brings tears pricking to the corners of Dean’s eyes. Watching Sam sleep shouldn’t feel so much like the world is ending. So many times, he almost reaches out.

Eventually he turns over, putting his back to Sam’s. He closes his eyes and tries to think of nothing. He feels Sam’s spine pressed against his, warm and straight, his brother at his rear—he tries to pretend it still means what it used to.

* * *

Dean has nightmares.

That by itself is nothing new. He’s had nightmares for a long time, a mishmash of screaming and steel, hellfire and blood. He’s used to seeing everyone he loves ripped to shreds. He’s used to seeing his own hand hold the blade. His subconscious is helpful that way.

These dreams are something new. They feature the sounds Sam had made, the high-pitched screams wrenched out as Crowley found the secrets in his brain and unspooled them one by one. Dean knows the sounds Sam makes when he’s dying, the hellfire screams and the low grunts of gut wounds. He never wanted to hear the noises Sam makes as healthy brain tissue dies—as everything that’s  _ Sam _ leaves this earth—but some nights, they’re all he can hear.

Dean doesn’t thrash at night. He’d trained himself out of it years ago—acting out your dreams with a loaded weapon beneath your pillow is a suicide waiting to happen, and making a sound in Purgatory is a death wish—but he twitches and whimpers and scares the everloving fuck out of Sam all the same.

Sam smacks him awake some nights, a heavy thump of his hand against Dean’s chest, pulling him out of perdition as surely as Cas ever did.

* * *

Dean didn’t expect to like gardening. Something about it always seemed a little prissy, something for retirees and soccer moms in the suburbs, neat zinnia bushes lined up in front of a house. He’d started as a matter of practicality—they needed food, always. If they were going to stay put for a while, it only made sense to grow what they could. Money is harder to come by these days. You can only hustle the same bars for so long, and Dean doesn’t like leaving Sam alone if he can help it.

Sam doesn’t like it either—he grabs at Dean’s shirt when Dean leaves the room, sticks to him like a shadow the way he hasn’t done since he was eight. (Sometimes he feels a pang of guilt over how much he likes it. His job has never been so simple. It’s so easy to keep an eye on Sammy when he’s never farther than Dean’s elbow.)

So, Dean gardens. He figures he’s technically a retiree anyway, although something about the word sticks in his craw. He likes it more than he thought he would. There’s something elemental about working in the yard, something simple and clean. Gardening makes sense the way hunting makes sense. Recipes for fertilizer aren’t all that different from recipes for spells. Digging a vegetable bed is easier than digging a grave.

The year ticks on, and nothing and no one bothers them.

It’s late summer. The tomatoes he planted in spring sit fat and heavy on the vine. Dean clips off the suckers between thumb and forefinger, pinching the new growth free. He works slowly, methodically, going straight down the line, tossing the vegetal waste to be trampled underfoot. The beans are starting to sprawl. He’ll need to build another trellis soon.

Sam sits on a little garden stool nearby, under an umbrella Dean set up to keep the sun off him. He gets cranky if he’s burnt. They’ve been out here for a few hours, and the sun has steadily crept across the sky until it’s just slanting over Sam’s face. Sam tilts his head up to catch the dying rays of the afternoon sun, eyes slitted against the light, mouth tilted in a smile.

Dean looks, and he loves him, loves him. He tucks his sweaty, dirty gloves in his back pocket and crouches beside Sam. He presses a kiss to one warm, stubbled cheek and settles in to sit with Sam awhile, listening to the cicadas chirp. It really is a nice garden.

* * *

He finds Sam with a gun in his hand one day, and it scares him half to death.

_ “Sammy!” _

It tears out of him in a bark that makes Sam flinch. It’s been ages since they raised their voices, and the shout hangs ugly in the air, too loud and out of place here. Sam drops the gun in shock, and Dean flinches, thinking accidental discharge, thinking bonehead civilian gun death statistics, thinking  _ Sammy. _

He yanks the pistol up off the floor, flicking the safety on and jamming it in the back of his waistband. Sam’s face crumples.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? What are you  _ thinking?  _ Fuck, Sam.”

Sam makes a loud, wordless sound of frustration. He hits Dean, uncoordinated but still goddamn effective, right in the face because Dean wasn’t ready for it. It’s been years since Sam really sucker punched him. The next few minutes are a flurry of fists and knees and elbows, grappling like they used to, until Dean manages to get Sam down on the ground, hips and hands pinned.

His stomach tilts with how much easier it is to subdue his brother.

_ “Stop it.” _

Sam bares his teeth and growls. And Dean—Dean doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know what to do with this, doesn’t know what to do when Sam smacks his head down, hard, against the uncarpeted hallway. When he does it again and again, and Dean has to loosen his grip on Sam’s wrist to get a hand under his skull before he cracks it open.

“Sam, stop. Please. Sam,  _ please.” _

Sam looks up at him with wide eyes, hurt and dark. He says something that might have been words, once upon a time. It’s almost like having a conversation.

“No,” Dean says, words skittering stop-motion jerky out of his mouth. “Sam, you— Do you want—?” his eyes are wide. “No.”

He covers his brother’s body with his own, some part hug and some part physical restraint. Someone is crying. Both of them are bleeding. There’s so much salt down here at the bottom. He lays on Sam until his body goes slack. He wants to say it’s comfort. It feels a lot like all the fight leaving a body.

Sam is listless for the rest of the day. He looks out the window and won’t talk to Dean. He won’t look at Dean for anything.

By the light of the moon, Dean buries their remaining guns in a deep, deep hole in the backyard. He tells himself it’s a matter of safety. He tells himself Sam doesn’t understand. He falls on the ground and can’t get back up for long, terrifying minutes as the moon travels across the sky, because whatever else is true, whatever else has changed, he still hasn’t learned his fucking lesson.

He will never learn that lesson.

* * *

Dean helps his brother dress in the mornings, one foot after another, wrangling long arms and legs into familiar clothing.

Sam still wears the flannel shirts he’s favored all his life. Dean finds something soothing in the act of doing up a line of small, unobtrusive buttons, one right after another. There’s something so simple and satisfying about it, the deftness it requires. It’s impossible to fuck it up.

He feels the steady rise and fall of Sam’s chest beneath his hands, the rhythmic thump of his heart. It’s a reason to be close, after everything.

He feeds his brother the way he used to, carrying on a one-sided conversation. He doesn’t rib Sam about his dietary choices anymore. He makes salads that no one eats. The garden doesn’t care about his interpersonal problems.

* * *

Cas shows up one day, and Dean slams the door.

* * *

Tonight is one of the better nights. They’re curled around each other like kittens, sharing each other’s warmth. Sam is only as far as the next pillow over, as near to Dean as his own skin, his own heart. Sam is as vital for living.

It’s raining again. He can hear it as soft as a lullaby out the window.

He’s awake, and so is Sam. He’s learned to hear the nuances in Sam’s breath after a lifetime. Sam’s fingers play across his chest, running along the ridges of his ribs, ticklish over the shelf of his collarbones.

Sam is lighter now, more birdlike. He’s leaned out since they’ve given up hunting. (When Dean says  _ given up _ in his head, it sounds like a choice.) Gone are the tight knots of muscle that built Sam up like a house, but he’s still long and sturdy. Still so much Dean’s brother as he crowds close in bed.

Sam pushes up against him in the dark. He gets a long, heavy leg hooked over Dean’s hips and pulls himself in close. His body is a furnace, even in the dead of winter, burning hot and still so solid. 

* * *

There are bad days, and there are good days. Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart.

**Author's Note:**

> [Mea culpa.](http://twitter.com/lovetincture)


End file.
